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Calling Cell Phones Could Cost More
tusixoh writes "CNN.com reports on another reason to keep a close eye on your phone bill. This fall, a subtle realignment in America's phone systems could cause a dramatic increase in what we pay to call cell phones that were once considered local now incur higher toll charges from landlines. The report states that it is unclear how many customers will be affected by these changes. No phone company would provide details on where people could be affected." Update: 10/25 12:31 GMT by M : The IP list carried a couple of informative articles on this: the original situation, and the informed commentary.
Land line telcos are doing what they can to make their money. Look closely at your bill and ensure every fee is accounted for. Or don't and pay something for nothing.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
Isn't this how it has been in Europe and other countries since the beginning? I remember it costing a lot more to call someone on a cell phone from a landline when I was in England. Just another one of those things that Americans will have to get used to, that everyone else seems to have acclimated to already.
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
that i'll continue to make my cell my main phone. now if i could just get a bogus number for all the times i don't want to give out my cell number for fear of it being sold... ;)
(Fot those in EU US cell phones have regular numbers and are called at regular rates, often free from your local area code)
Because of this, you can practically get a phone for free with no contract, so this model has its up sides. Personally, I prefer the US approach, he who has the phone foots the (monthly) bill!
I'll start this comment by saying this:
I'm cheap.
I had no features added to my land line and made VERY FEW long distance calls. Either way my bill came out to around 30+ bucks. No caller ID, No Call Waiting, Nothing.
So... I decided to switch to a Cell Phone. It's only 42 bucks WITH TAX. The key is WITH TAX. With nights & weekends I'm always on the phone at night & costs nothing.
The point of my story:
Land lines are going to die!.
I have no desire to ever have a land line. Right now it's just cablemodem & Cell phone. That's all I need. I don't even have a dial-up.
My thoughts...
Here's how it works:
This is one reason mobiles are more common overseas. They didn't just start as executive toys. For example, workmen on call sites could be given a prepaid phone (with viturally no money on it), and then be reachable.
Madness takes its toll. Exact change please.
... why I don't use phones, period. Well, to be perfectly honest, I call my girlfriend when she really needs/wants me to, but other than that, I stay away from both cell and normal phones.
...
:-D
Cell phones are not very reliable. Calls are dropped all of the time. I've had conversations where one of the two parties involved has had to call back two, three, even four times because of lost reception. Also, many towns don't want cell towers, so you may find while driving down I-95 that certain areas just kill your cell phone's reception.
I also don't *want* to be reached sometimes, especially by a boss or other superior. Cellphones eliminate that freedom because you're always "plugged in" to the (digital)/(rest of the) world. That means eight hour work days turn into 9 hour work days, and you may get a call while at a baseball game on Saturday or church Sunday morning.
I just set-up my personal voicemail box today (2 or 3 months into the school year), but that was only because my mom was about to disown me if I didn't do so. I tell her I prefer email, but she prefers the phone. So, I can't win there, and she's my mom, so
I also don't like people who can barely drive to begin with to use cellphones on the road. I know there have been studies that show it's worse than driving drunk!
Anyway, this ends my rant...sorry for running-on so terribly, but I really hate cellphones
Eric Krout dot com, ya'll...
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
It wouldn't suprise me at all if this was an attempt to get more people to use cell phones. The phone companies make more money off of cell phones compaired to your average land line per month. Cell to cell calls are often coverd by special minute deals. Plus then there will be more people to spam with text messages about special offers.
We're going to make information free Mr. Anderson, whether you like it, or not.
So right now I'm sitting in a computer lab (working on an overdue assignment). There is a large sign posted (where everyone can see it) that say's "No Cellphones!".
Guess what? In the past 5 minutes at least 5 cells phones have rang! This is disturbing to those of use trying to work.
On a more serious note. Maybe higher charges would make the inappropriate use of cells phones less common. I've seen numerous car accidents caused by people on cell phones who weren't paying attention to what they were doing.
Maybe it'll also mean less phones ringing during movies!
Here's one grumpy nerd hoping...
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
The comparison with Europe is pointless, as it's not going there anytime soon. The article says that only zones using reverse billing (very few) will be affected, you will pay LD calling those cells. The rest, paying for airtime when receiving a call, remains. A more important point is that cell. numbers will become portable among carriers. This is much more newsworthy to me!
have you been defaced today?
yeah right, /.
busy working awaying posting messages on
I wouldn't mind this if it meant not being charged or loosing minutes when someone called me on my cell. If they want to talk to me let them pay for it. After all I've been paying to hear them.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
The title is totaly wrong for this story. It need to change to: "Being interupted 24x7 Could Cost More".
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
In the UK if i go abroad with my UK cellphone say for arguments sake Spain and you call me from anywhere then you will only pay the standard premium cost (approx 40p per min) but as my phone is officially "roaming" as its in another country, I have to pay for the international part of your call to cover the multiple network operators involved ie: the price of a international call from England to Spain so ineffect its like a reverse charge call !
and you feel ripped off!
a lot of people have been caught out when their friends have called them while they are on holiday and they chat thinking its a regular call until they get home and see their cellphone bill and see hideous charges incurred for other peoples calls, needless to say sales calls get a mouthful of abuse.
at least here in England (and Europe I presume from reading the other comments) the calling party pays. Which makes sense. You make the call, you pay for it. I don't want to pay for YOUR DECISION to call me! I primarily don't use my phone to call people, instead, I use it for text messages and for recieving calls. Thus, I am quite happily able to live off £10 of pre-paid credit for months on end (i get free txts) - which suits my meagre budget just fine.
ppl in the US should just stop whining and accept the fact that the most of the other continents are charging more for mobile calls - you guys were just spoilt :-p *pouts*
Fight Crime - Shoot Back!
For instance, in Texas basic phone service is around $20 a month. That gets you local calls in a local metropolitan area(not the greater metropolitan area), or, if you are in a rural area, perhaps a 10-15 mile radius. If you call outside that small area, you are charged a long distance toll that can easily be twice the interstate long distance toll. You can avoid this toll for the small fee of around $30 a month. If you want the other services, like caller ID, voice mail, etc, that will cost $40. The total, with taxes, is well over $100.
Why again do we have a residential land line? For less than $100 I can get plenty minutes, all the services, plus free long national long distance on my cell phone. I like having a land line so I can have a place that telemarketers and other annoying persons can call, not to mention the DSL. That is sort of worth $25 a month. But $30 more a month to avoid a toll for calling next door. That is crazy.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I already got rid of my home phone and just use a cell phone. Also, I will be moving to VoIP at the office as soon as Vonage can get me a Denver area code.
It's nice to be free from those local phone service bastards.
CowboyNeal posted this story? and the previous one? I thought he was just a made-up poll answer!
It's only if you are calling a number whose physical switch is outside your local landline calling area.
For example, I'll take Delaware as an example since it's dead simple. Three counties, three rate centers. If you have a cell phone whose number is from county #1, then county #2 and #3 pay normal intra-lata rates to call your number. Users in county #1 will continue to not pay.
In Delaware, cell companies give you a choice what county you want your number from so most people get one in the same county they live.
Let's take another theoretical example. Let's say you live in Benson AZ and your cell phone number is from Tucscon. It's a toll call from Benson to Tucson for landline users, but since Benson isn't big enough to have its own infrastructure for basing cell phone NUMBERS out of it (not towers), then the charges to call a cell phone based in Tucson from a landline in Benson were waived.
(Above just being an example of a small town with no local calling to its neighboring big town that I know, it's not a literal example)
Text messages are ridiculously high, however thats because of a stupid uniformed easily led market (teens).
Normal phone's have a bandwidth of upto 9600bps (at least thats what I get using my phone as a modem). Thats 4.2Mbytes an hour. It costs me arround £1.20 ($2) for a one hour call, or 50 cents/megabyte. This is on a limited, highly contested frequency. A far cry from text message costings. Yes text's rake it in for phone companies, however 50 cents a megabyte isnt too bad.
It doesnt seem fair to charge a receipitent for a call. Think about it, if I dont like you I set a computer to phone you 24/7, and you have to pay for it! Give me the worldwide standard instead of one of the u.s. proprietry systems, any day.
Did anyone read the article? What the phone companies did is *worse* than that. They eliminated something that *will* affect many dialup ISP users. Not to mention all those companies in New York City that pay not to have their area changed (although that's a whole other story)...
What the local phone companies are getting rid of is "reverse billing." This is a service which allows a company located in Region A to offer a phone number in Region B by paying the difference in cost for phone calls made to their Region B number. When cell phone companies first started up, they only had callable offices in relatively few locations, which could have made calling cell phones expensive. Nowadays, this is not a bit deal anymore.
Unfortunately, a lot of other firms like using reverse lookups. ISPs use reverse billing to allow them to have phone numbers all over the place while maintaining only a few central dialup pools. Outreach programs often use these numbers to reach out to communities that they would not have been able to easily call them otherwise.
Personally, I feel (*hope*) that CNN seems to be missing some details. If the phone companies truely are getting rid of reverse billing, one would think that they would be getting rid of all their 800/888/877/866 numbers that are *entirely* reverse billed down to pay phone costs. And if a cell phone provider with a central switch in Region A serves customers in region A', and said switch is located in region A, I don't see why reverse billing would come into play; the cell phone company would be like any other large business that just happened to own a few hundred phone numbers in the area.
This will have zero impact on me, which is one of the reasons why I decided to take control of my phone bill. I was getting pretty sick of SBC trying to stick it to me every way that they could.
My last phone bill? $76.69. Same as the month before it. And that included standard local telephone service, unpublished number, voice mail (with telephone or web access to pick up messages and pager/email notification), caller id, call waiting, 3-way calling, speed dial, anonymous call rejection, and maybe another feature or two I don't remember. (I still remember SBC billing me for "touch tone". Bastards.)
On top of that, I now get free calling 24x7 to anywhere within my area code. And free calling 24x7 to anywhere within my state. And free calling 24x7 to anywhere within the continental United States. Frankly, the only thing I have to worry about is accidently calling a Canadian number.
My last phone bill had 1,739 minutes of long distance in 249 calls, for an added fee of only $0.00. And no, I didn't have to just call members of the plan. This was the rate to absolutely any regular telephone number in the US.
I was on SBC's "local plus" plan, which billed me about $30/month extra on top of basic telephone service to call anywhere within my area code for free. Now, I'm saving money, got tons more features, and don't have to worry about fluctuating phone bills. Thank God.
Yes, I know. This absolutely isn't the perfect plan for everyone. But MCI's The Neighborhood really has a lot going for it if you've got a regular phone bill that is at least $70. I wish their financial condition was better. I'd like to see them tear SBC a new hole.
I work as a network engineer and I do the routing for one of the major cell phone companies here in the U.S.
To answer your question, until 11/24/2002 phone numbers, for the most part, are given out in 10K blocks (NPA/Nxx) to specific compaines; wireline, wireless, whatever. In theory, if you know the first six digits of the phone number, you can tell if it's wireless or wireline. That is, if you have access to that information (like I do). To the best of my knowledge, I don't think people outside of Telcos have access to this so the point is moot.
After 11/24, all Telcos will be participating in number pooling. Basically we donate numbers back to the pool for other carriers to use (if we're only using 50 numbers out of 10K) and whatever we still use is routed back to us via local number portability. So now even if you had the aforementioned information, it could be invalid. Basically your screwed one way or the other.
To further complicate matters, after 11/24/2003 all numbers will be portable between any carrier within a rate center. So you can move your number from (ex.) Verizon landline to AT&T Wireless to Nextel, to AT&T Local Services...and on and on....as many times as you'd like. By then, it's impossible to know.
Very few people are going to be affected by this change. The issue only applies to geographically large area codes, in which certain numbers within the area code actually constitute long distance calls. For example, if your area code is AAA, then the number:
1-AAA-333-1234
might be local, while
1-AAA-444-1234
is a long distance call. In these area codes, the three digit "prefix" after the area code is what determines where you are calling, and calling between certain pairs of prefixes is long distance.
How does this apply to cell phones? In very geographically spread-out area codes, cell phone service providers do not necessarily have a prefix in every fare zone. Returning to the example, a cell phone company might have the prefix 1-AAA-455, which is local from a 444- phone, but not a 333- phone.
In these situations, people living in the 333 calling area might be assigned 455 cell phone numbers, which would be long distance when called from a local phone. In the past, what happened is that if someone called 455 from a 333 phone, the cell phone provider would be "reverse billed" for the long distance charges. Cell providers didn't mind this because it didn't happen very often, and because they hoped it would lead to cell phone adoption in new markets (in which they might eventually install their own equipment and get their own prefix).
Now what's happening is that the land-line providers want to end the reverse billing, primarily because it is very complicated to implement. In particular, there are going to be some changes whereby people will get to keep their cell phone numbers even if they switch mobile phone companies. When this happens, the existing implementation of reverse billing will not work any more--things are complicated by the fact that now a call to 455 might need to be reverse billed to one of several different cell phone companies.
Since reverse billing is so rare anyway, the land line companies successfully lobbied to stop implementing it.
Note that this is very different from say, Europe, where calling a cell phone is always more expensive than calling a local land line. All that's happening is that there will be some fare zones in which it is impossible to get a cell phone number. So some people may not be able to call any cell phones free from their land lines. However, for any particular cell phone there will always be land lines somewhere that can call it with a local call.
In any event, highly populated areas with overlay area codes (where calling accross area codes is not long distance) should see no change in how calls to cell phones are billed.
Oh goody. I get to post my favorite rant on why "caller pays" isn't better. In a nutshell, here's why:
When the person who owns the cellphone pays for their own calls, they have a strong incentive to seek out the cheapest plan they can get. Hence, they put direct pressure on their cellphone company to be more efficient and keep their operating costs as low as possible.
When the person who owns the cellphone doesn't pay for the call, the charges for the call are "reverse-billed" back to the caller. Since the caller isn't a customer of the cellphone company, the cellphone company has far less incentive to keep the reverse-charges low. (Ever notice that collect calls are more expensive than regular long-distance calls? A similar economic principle is at work.) Typically the government steps in to regulate the prices that companies are allowed to charge, and that's rarely as efficient as direct competition.
I'm convinced that over the long-run, the "caller-pays" system will result in higher costs than a "cellphone-owner-pays" system. This depends, of course, on the remaining competitive barriers coming down: in the US, for instance, it's still too difficult to switch from one provider to the other. Hopefully the new regulations which allow cellphone owners to switch providers without losing their phone number will help in this area.
Incidentally, if my explanation didn't make sense, here's a much more detailed explanation.
Yeah, they do.
And then the boss complains that your cellphone is off when he tries to reach you on the weekends / your vacation / etc. I know plenty of people who have gotten yelled at for turning their cellphones off (no matter when they were turned off).
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
We have the same deal with Cell Phones in Japan. All incoming calls are free, and the use of email often negates the need for outgoing calls. And yes, I did say email, not that dinky SMS protocol.
Most folks don't even bother getting a land line since you have to actually purchase the line for about $600.00+. Calling a local land line is about 3 cents per minute and calling a cell phone is around 10 to 12 cents per minute. Cell phones have a completely different prefix, so you won't accidentally get raped on the bill. The flip side of course is that outgoing calls on cell phones run about 20 cents per minute and you won't find any 4000 night/weekend plans around here. My plan is 5000 yen/mo. (about $38 at the current rate) and I get around 200 outgoing minutes excluding the 1 to 2 yen per email charge and my daily web activities checking news and weather. If I have a busy social calendar, which is about 4 dates per week plus assorted work functions, my bill is arround $100.00. I never use my land line for anything more than a link to my 12MBit ADSL provider.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
I live in the US and use Vonage VoIP. I've noticed that Vonage charges me only 5 cents/minute to call a UK landline, but a whopping 23 cents/minute to call a UK cellphone. It's possible that Vonage is inserting some sort of markup there, but given that their rates are generally bare-bones low, it would appear that British cellphone companies are charging (close to) 18 cents/minute to simply provide service from the cellphone tower to the handset-- not including the long distance charges. That's a lot.
Here's my question: what do you do if you feel that cost is too high? Under the US system, when my phone bills are too high I look for a cheaper provider (the mere threat of this keeps prices low.) If the prices are too high in the UK, it looks to me like you have a whole lot less recourse. Either you shell out that 18 cents/minute, or you don't call other peoples' cellphones at all. Where are these charges set, anyway-- does the government mandate the charges?
It seems as though you've got a lot more leverage over your cellphone company's charges when you pay for all the costs vs. when there's reverse-billing going on. Theoretically, this should lead to a more competitive and therefore more efficient US cellphone industry, which benefits us all.
I would not put up with someone chewing me out for not answering my cellphone any more than I would for not answering my home landline phone. It's my phone and my time; I choose when to or not to answer it.
If it is a work-related issue, then the company can pay for the cell phone, and pay a good bonus for placing me on-call. If the company is not willing to do that, then designated work hours are their time and all other hours are my time to do with as I please, which includes choosing to not answer hte phone if I don't want to.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.